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Came straight to this place just like I’d known the way. There was something in my life that ruined that house. That house was myself. It’s the 1880s. Jeb Rand (Robert Mitchum) is an orphan raised by a foster family in New Mexico who remains tormented by dreams of the traumatic murder of his parents when he was a child. He is treated well by his foster mother, Mrs. Callum (Judith Anderson), and her daughter, Thor (Teresa Wright), but he and foster brother Adam (John Rodney) have a tense relationship. When Jeb is shot at while riding his horse, he blames Adam but Mrs. Callum knows that in fact it’s another member of the Callum clan who is out to get him, her brother-in-law, Grant (Dean Jagger) out to avenge events of the past of which Jeb has only the most tenuous knowledge … This psychological revenge western is a film noir with Freudian aspects – obliterating the notion of family in a glassily emotional construction which has lots of weird nightmarish aftereffects to haunt the viewer making us feel like Mitchum’s sleepwalking protagonist. There is plenty to enjoy here beyond the immediacy of the character tensions – the stunning nocturnal landscapes (shot by James Wong Howe, edited by Christian Nyby), the oppressive interiors, the suspense of the revelations withheld until a crucial moment in the drama and Mitchum singing The Streets of Laredo in a score composed by Max Steiner. Adapted by Niven Busch (Wright’s husband) from a story by Horace McCoy, this is one of the strangest and least logical films in that narrow sub-genre which lasted a few years after WW2. It’s worth it for the contrasting performing styles of its fantastic stars engaged in this baroque clashing of generic components and the return of the repressed. Directed by Raoul Walsh. If that house was me what part of me was buried in those graves?

Look at me now – holed up here with a lot of dotty females. No job. No future. Ex-con Lily (Billie Whitelaw), a maid at Dame Beatrice’s (Athene Seyler) boarding house, steals a mink coat to give to Beatrice, the other residents of the house organize to return the coat and save Lily from arrest because she’s done her time inside already. However, the excitement is a great change from their boring lives, and they decide to start stealing coats for charity purposes. Major Rayne (Terry-Thomas) a former WW2 officer missing the cut and thrust of battle and orders, leads the otherwise female group of unlikely thieves – Nanette (Hattie Jacques), Pinkie (Elspeth Duxbury) and Beatrice. Things become very complicated indeed when the team of ‘Gangsters and Their Molls’ as the newspapers have it might be found out because Lily starts to date a policeman, Jim Benham (Jack Hedley). The gang’s last job – they raid a casino disguised as police officers – is itself duplicated by a raid by the real thing and a detective (Raymond Huntley – he was bound to show up, wasn’t he) knocks on the door … This is a typically British farce of eccentrics and implausible plotting with a wonderful cast. Jacques has a good time of it as the masculine take-charge woman who then dresses up to look rather like Diana Dors while T-T doesn’t really let rip for a while. Seyler is fun as the do-gooder Dame whose nephew (Kenneth Williams) is a well-appointed fence and Duxbury is good as a quasi-hysteric: Noel Purcell turns up as a very helpful burglar indeed – right under her bed. You’ll recognise some other famous faces in blink-or-you’ll-miss-them uncredited bits – Clement Freud as a croupier, Peter Vaughan, Ron Moody … Written by Michael Pertwee and Peter Blackmore based on Peter Coke’s stage farce, with a jaunty sub-jazz muzak backdrop composed by Philip Green. Directed by Robert Asher. Even minor Terry-Thomas is better than none at all!

You’re playing the game I started in 1969. In 1869 in New Hampshire two men bury a board game. 100 years later young Alan Harris (Adam Hann-Byrd) can do nothing right for his exacting father (Jonathan Hyde) who owns a shoe factory and intends that Alan go to the same prep school he attended. Alan invites schoolfriend Sarah (Laura Bell Bundy) over and when they play the board game he found after being chased by bullies he gets sucked into it and she runs from the house. 26 years later orphaned siblings Peter (Bradley Pierce) and Judy Shepherd (Kirsten Dunst) move to the town with their aunt (Bebe Neuwirth). While exploring the old mansion she got at rock bottom price, the youngsters find a curious, jungle-themed game called Jumanji in the attic. When they start playing, they free the adult Alan Parrish (Robin Williams), who’s been stuck in the game’s inner jungle world for decades. They go in search of the adult Sarah (Bonnie Hunt) who’s now a psychic with an extreme need for therapy. They join forces and if they win Jumanji, the kids can free Alan for good – but that means braving giant bugs, ill-mannered monkeys and even stampeding rhinos as well as a killer big-game hunter who bears a distinct resemblance to Alan’s father … Adapted from Chris Van Allsburg’s eponymous novel by Greg Taylor, Jonathan Hensleigh and Jim Strain, this is a superb, action-packed family adventure that never loses sight of the father-son story at its heart principally because the characters are highly relatable. Dunst plays a compulsive liar while her brother is more sensitive but they’re not obnoxious and their aunt’s impoverished attempts at parenting are entirely understandable. Particularly when a monkey takes over her car. When Robin Williams is unleashed from the game in full survival mode from the hellish jungle he’s absolutely on it with a few nice put-downs that aren’t too cruel for a school age kid. It’s great fun to see Pierce transform into a monkey – complete with tail. This is resolved wonderfully and directed at a terrific pace with superb design at every level. Cracking! Directed by Joe Johnston.

Why is it rich girls are always flat chested? Millie (Julie Andrews) arrives straight off the bus in 1920s NYC and determines to immediately transform her chance of winning a rich husband by becoming a flapper and taking an office job and determining to marry her handsome boss Trevor Graydon (John Gavin). She befriends innocent new arrival orphaned Miss Dorothy (Mary Tyler Moore) at the rooming house run by Mrs Meers (Beatrice Lillie) who is very busy with her Chinese staff running back and forth to a laundry. Paperclip salesman Jimmy Smith (James Fox) meets Millie at a friendship dance and is immediately besotted. But Millie wants money and only has eyes for Trevor. When Jimmy takes her and Dorothy to a rich friend’s house on Long Island where they meet the eccentric widow Muzzy (Carol Channing) Millie believes she’s falling for him – and then sees him in what appears to be a rendez vous with Dorothy. Meanwhile, Mrs Meers is plotting to kidnap Dorothy and sell her into white slavery – the latest in a series of such orphans that go missing … How can this be 50 years old already?! It moves and looks as clean as a whistle. Adapted by Richard Morris from 1956 British musical Chrysanthemum, this exercise in nostalgia is a great showcase for Lillie and Channing in particular. It’s a splendidly cheery and eccentric excursion into The Boy Friend territory which revels in very un-PC swipes at the Chinese, avaricious women and the vanities of the rich while singing them up a storm. Director George Roy Hill has fun with silent movie tropes including a Harold Lloyd-like skyscraper sequence and makes great use of amusing intertitles explaining Andrews’ thoughts with new songs from Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn alongside 20s numbers which greatly embellish this story of disguised identity and screwball romance. It’s much too long but is tremendously enlivened by the unique talents of Channing whose Academy Award-winning performance includes the showstopper Jazz Baby. Yeah!

When an irresistible force such as me meets an immovable object like you something’s got to give. American playboy millionaire Jervis Pendleton (Fred Astaire) finds himself on state business in France in a broken down car and happens upon an orphanage where eighteen-year old waif Julie (Leslie Caron) is instructing the younger children. She never meets him but he pays for her tuition at a ladies’ college in Massachusetts on condition that she writes him a letter once a month – which he then doesn’t read for two years until his secretary (Thelma Ritter) insists. Then they meet up because she’s rooming (by his arrangement) with his niece. And, she falls for him without realising that he is ‘John Smith’… Gene Kelly’s influence is all over Fifties musicals – the French connection and the Broadway Melody sequence from Singin’ in the Rain play large parts in this story adapted from Jean Webster’s classic young adult novel of 1912 which already got a handful of previous adaptations, including one for Mary Pickford and another for Shirley Temple (Curly Top). Henry and Phoebe Ephron (Nora’s folks) create a long-ish but diverting vehicle for Astaire and Caron who are both entirely delightful in a situation that could be kind of creepy were it not for the fact that the unseemliness of a relationship is something addressed early on. In fact, the unsuitability of such an old man romancing a young woman is part of the drama. There are some wonderful dance sequences as you’d expect and Jervis’ obsession with music is one of the most attractive things about the story – the early scene where he bounces drum sticks off the walls is really something. This outstays its welcome by at least one fantasy sequence (with Caron aping Cyd Charisse) but overall it’s a beautiful production as you’d expect from that underrated director Jean Negulesco and it totally oozes charm.

– Get in the car Melinda! – It’s Matilda!–Whatever. Matilda (Mara Wilson) is born into a family that can’t stand her. She’s a genius among trolls and wants to go to school. Father (Danny DeVito) is a gangster and mother (Rhea Perlman) is a tramp. This gifted offspring channels her frustration at their raised voices and anger into telekinesis and when she’s bullied by the violent principal Miss Trunchbull (Pam Ferris) at Crunchem Hall (say it quickly) Elementary School, class teacher Miss Honey (Embeth Davitz) feels her pain and befriends her. Trunchbull is her late father’s step- sister in law and had her put out of the house where her beloved doll is still in her childhood bedroom. When Matilda convinces her of her powers they set out to retrieve it … Roald Dahl’s classic gets a good adaptation by Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord (with some changes) but it’s DeVito’s direction that grabs you: using his typical style of low angles and forced perspective, you are emotionally placed in little Matilda’s horrible domestic experience and left in no doubt as to how she feels – born to the wrong people, displaced in the wrong home, needing friends. For children of all ages, with Paul Reubens as one of two FBI agents expertly dispatched by the little girl.

What is it they want? I’ve done enough. Screenwriter Emeric Pressburger wrote a novella about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War entitled Killing a Mouse on Sunday. JP Miller adapted it as Behold a Pale Horse (pace The Book of Revelations) and Fred Zinnemann (a director who purveyed an interest in men of conscience) took it to the screen. It was shot in southwest France but there was intimidation from the fascist government of Franco to the extent that Columbia Pictures divested its distribution arm in Spain afterwards and it wasn’t screened on US TV networks following intervention from Madrid. Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn are reunited following The Guns of Navarone as protagonist/antagonist to each other 20 years after the cessation of hostilities. Peck plays former resistance fighter Manuel Artiguez (loosely based on real-life Catalan guerilla ‘Zapater’) living in exile in Pau, the Basque region of France. Quinn is Vinolas, an officer in the Guardia Civil who has vowed to kill his enemy of longstanding. The young son Paco (Marietto Angeletti) of Artiguez’ former co-fighter arrives in Pau to ask him to avenge his father’s murder – the Guardia Civil beat him to death to try and find out Artiguez’ hiding place. A young priest Francisco (Omar Sharif) is summoned to the deathbed in the hospital at San Martin of Artiguez’ mother (Mildred Dunnock) an atheist who nonetheless asks him to stop off en route to Lourdes to warn her son not to return to Spain or he will be killed. Francisco’s colleague in the priesthood has a brain injury from a bank robbery the Loyalists carried out so he himself is implicated in any action against the police. Paco warns Artiguez that his close associate in Pau, Carlos (Raymond Pellegrin) is in fact an informer who watched his father’s murder. The scene is set for a squaring of accounts and promises a standoff of epic proportions – Civil War has the terrible longlasting effect of cleaving even families asunder. The first part of the film has its focus on Vinolas and his quest for revenge and his marital issues; then we are primarily in Pau with the unfolding events. This leads to a pacing problem. Sharif and Quinn meet and we hope for something as graceful as their parts in Lawrence of Arabia and it’s promising but not really as effective as you would wish. When Peck and Sharif meet across the border it’s really a high point as the men’s various takes on morality are parried. Vinolas is then in the background until the final cataclysmic balancing of the books. There should be more equivalence between these two but it’s really only down to a taste in loose women. The drama is slow and rather like watching pieces being manoeuvred on a chessboard. Shot in a wonderfully oily monochrome by Jean Badal (with whom Zinnemann purportedly did not see eye to eye) this is beautifully captured. The action however is distinctly lacking and the climax is not the one we want – a shootout which wraps a conclusion that is neither logically exact nor emotionally true. We have been led to believe that this is the post-war equivalent of One Last Job and it fails spectacularly due to a wrongheaded decision by Artiguez (and the creative team). Who puts an act of personal treachery above the common good and the prospect of political revolution? That’s the question.There’s a subtle score by Maurice Jarre which picks out single notes and chords and drum sounds in an unconventional fashion and there are nice supporting performances by Christian Marquand, Rosalie Crutchley and Dunnock. This is one of several films by Zinnemann dealing with the phenomenon of fascism (and the resistance to it) in the twentieth century, a body of work which means he more than deserves the occasionally perverse accolade of auteur. It’s not his best film but it is a testament to his beliefs. A misfire, yes, but a fascinating one, with Peck mostly convincing and Quinn very good but it’s Sharif you’ll remember. Those eyes!

Jake Portman (Asa Butterfield) gets along far better with his grandfather Abe (Terence Stamp) than with his parents so when the old man dies, with his eyes missing and a strange creature hiding outside his apartment in the bushes, Jake recalls all the stories he told him about living in a magical place during WW2. After several sessions with therapist Dr Golan (Allison Janney) he convinces his reluctant father (Chris O’Dowd) to take him to Wales where he is befriended by some Peculiars, enters a derelict mansion through a portal in a cave and encounters the very much alive Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) who lives in this weird time loop with all the weirdly gifted kids whom his grandfather told him about. They have to ward off a powerful enemy who feast on the children’s eyes, led by Samuel L. Jackson who delivers his now customary cod-threatening performance and after taking Miss Peregrine, the children must engage in a final face-off (or eye-off…) in a theatre in modern-day Blackpool. Jake himself has a special power which can save them all … There’s a level of ordinariness to this which is irritating. It’s well set up, with Tim Burton returning to contemporary Florida (remember the achingly wonderful Edward Scissorhands?) and the problematic father-son dynamic that fuels some of his better work. However there’s no real sense of mystery or fabulism that would bring this to a different realm. What is best about it? Probably the Ray Harryhausen-style doll animations. Emotions lie half-buried in the middle of this – about being the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, hating your dumb parents and only finding your true family because you possess an understanding of life that other people don’t (seeing invisible monsters is inordinately helpful). Oh well – there’s a good joke about the evil motivations of psychiatrists, though. Adapted by Jane Goldman from the novel by Ransom Riggs, and apparently a lot of changes took place in the writing. Very, very uneven.

Michelle Darnell is the orphan who grows up to be a big businesswoman – Melissa McCarthy, to be exact, whose rise to titanic success arouses jealousy and she’s framed for insider trading by her ex, villainous rival Peter Dinklage, going by the name Renault (formerly Ronald). When she gets out of the clink she reinvents her brand through her former employee Kristen Bell’s daughter by virtue of a takeover of the Dandelions, a charitable group of kids that sells brownies door to door – because Bell makes the best ones ever and Michelle sees a billion dollar a year business. One of the other mothers just sees a felon. Then Dinklage sees another business opportunity and a paradoxical way to get back with the only woman he’s ever loved … Co-written by McCarthy with husband and director Ben Falcone (who also produces with her) and Steve Mallory, this trades on the star’s great ability to play a scene and there are some excellent laugh out loud moments. However subtle it ain’t and the lapses in taste prevent it being in the same league as something like Bad News Bears which it weirdly recalls (maybe it’s the kids’ uniforms). Co-produced by Will Ferrell, Adam McKay and Chris Henchy, this is just not up to the standard of Spy which was so subversive, satirical and, yes, smart. This manages to be too long and too short and enjoyable and a waste of talent all at once: is it me?!

I was moving between several countries the year this was released so I saw the trailer in many different locations but contrived to miss the film itself. It’s 1885 in British Columbia. Orphaned bear cub Youk befriends wounded older grizzly Bart (actually a Kodiak) and they have to avoid dedicated hunter Tcheky Karyo on their journey to survival. An utterly remarkable piece of work by director Jean-Jacques Annaud with exquisite cinematography by Philippe Rousselot. Now you know what bear cubs dream about. A wilderness film more than worth waiting for. Adapted from American author James Curwood’s 1916 novella The Grizzly King by Roman Polanski’s regular collaborator Gerard Brach. Absolutely wonderful.